Were the hysterical attacks on Bush’s national defense measures, now apparently running their course, nothing but politics?

Victor Hanson writes at the Corner:

With the Democratic no-go on Guantanamo (I’ll leave it to the better informed to ascertain the degree that the Democratic Congress came to the rescue of an embarrassed Obama administration and cut off funding for the shutdown to allow him an out with the now familiar excuse of “they did it—not me, who keeps promises”), I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush “shredding the Constitution.”

Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan—and now Guantanamo—are officially no longer part of the demonic Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus, but apparently collective legitimate anti-terrorism measures designed to thwart killers, and by agreement, after years of observance, of great utility in keeping us safe the last eight years.

Add in the Holder statements about Guantanamo in the 2002 interview, the Pelosi/Rockefeller/et al. waterboarding briefings, the need to consider torture in past statements by senators such as Schumer, and I think historians will now look back at these “dark years” as largely a collective, bipartisan effort.

All of which leaves us a final musing: If so, what was the hysteria of 2001-2008 about other than simple politics?

I doubt we get any more movies about ongoing renditions, redactions, any more Checkpoint-like novels, any more waterboarding skits and reenactments, any more late-night comedians doing their Bush tapped, intercepted, tortured, renditioned, tribunaled poor suspect X routines.

And I guess as well that the good old days of supposedly flushed Korans in Guantanamo and Omar the poor liberationist renditioned to Cairo are over. We are now in the age of a sober and judicious President Obama who circumspectly, if reluctantly and in anguish at the high cost, does what is necessary to keep us safe.

And we won’t see a brave young liberal senator, Obama-like, barnstorming the Iowa precincts blasting a presidency for trampling our values with the shame of Guantanamo, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, military tribunals, Predators, Iraq, etc. That motif just dissolved—or rather, it never really existed.

It short, all the fury, the vicious slander, the self-righteous outbursts, the impassioned speeches from the floor, the “I accuse” op-eds by the usual moralistic pundits—all that turned out to be solely about politics, nothing more.
[end of Hanson article]

Let us hope that Hanson is right, and that the hysterical and hateful denunciations of the Bush administration over the Patriot Act, the surveillance of phone conversations between domestic terror suspects and persons in terrorist foreign countries, and other legitimate and necessary national defense measures have run their course. This is not to say that these measures could not be criticized. But the extreme nature of the attacks (“shredding the Constitution” and all that) pushed any rational criticism and debate out of the picture.

However, Hanson errs badly in reducing this phenomenon to nothing more than politics, thus showing his characteristic lack of grasp of liberalism, in which he typically portrays the “bad” left-liberalism that he opposes as a set of negative emotional attitudes, never as a set of principles. This is not surprising, since Hanson is himself a liberal, a right-liberal (a liberal universalist with a gun, as I have called him), sharing the left’s belief in equality and tolerance as the highest goods.

Left-liberalism lives by the continual demonization of that which is not liberal, or that which the liberal script portrays as non-liberal (e.g., liberals’ portrayed of Bush’s uber-Wilsonian pro-democracy policy as fascistic). The objects of the attack change, but the meaning of the attack remains constant: it is that the good, liberal people, “us,” are faced with a primordial, all-encompassing, fascist evil compounded of capitalist greed, power-madness, medieval superstition, and racial bigotry that must be opposed and eliminated, which will be done by remaking society from top to bottom, with “us” in charge. This message transcends the seeking of mere political advantage. It is not primarily about politics in the ordinary sense, but about the maintenance and reinforcement of the left-liberal world view and the unending liberal campaign to eliminate everything that is non-liberal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2009 01:16 PM | Send